stage fright

I had the pleasure recently of working with a small number of health care executives on their public personas and speaking. Now, I have tremendous admiration for the vast majority of health care people because they’re in the business of saving lives, and that’s hugely important work. And it hits close to home for me. […]

Most of us have heard about a study that claims public speaking is our number one fear. Jerry Seinfeld even made a joke out of it, noting that if fear of public speaking was number one, and death was lower down the list, it meant that people would rather die than give the eulogy at the […]

What else can you do with speech anxiety besides worry? Readers of this blog will know that I’ve given you lots of ways to handle those feelings of panic, from addressing the symptoms with breathing, to mental exercises, to work on your unconscious fears, to embracing the feelings for the adrenalin that they signify. But […]

Your heart is racing. Your palms are clammy. Your stomach is starting to send distress signals to your brain. You’re flushed, and you’re feeling hot under your business attire. Your mind is rehearsing disaster scenarios. You’re just about to give a speech. It’s not a good feeling, for approximately 95 percent of the population that […]

Working with clients on stage fright I use a number of approaches, some of which involve embracing the adrenaline, and some of which involve minimizing it. My personal favorite is to embrace the symptoms that adrenaline produces and tell yourself that it means that you’re about to do something exciting, and that your body is […]

Back in the cave person era, by all accounts, we evolved this exquisite mechanism, the fight or flight response, to handle brief, intense moments of danger, when we needed to be on high alert and face the world ready to fight or get the heck outta there. We’re not even consciously aware of this mechanism, […]

In a blog post last week, I discussed a recent study that showed that we leak our stress levels to other people. As I pointed out, if stress is contagious and we leak our emotions, then speakers need to concern themselves with their emotional states before and during their speeches. A stressed-out speaker will induce […]

A new study by a team of German psychologists has determined that seeing another person under stress activates your stress hormones. Stress is contagious. We leak our emotions to each other. Both men and women are affected in the same way; gender makes no difference, despite traditional assumptions that women may be more empathetic than […]

As I discussed last time, the reality is that your conscious mind is beset by essentially random directives from your unconscious mind, some of which help you succeed in your larger purposes in life and most of which don’t. For public speakers, to avoid this trap, you first need to learn to visualize success. And […]

A recent study from Harvard Business School of 400 participants found that if you tell yourself to get excited when about to do something stressful, like give a speech, you do better than when you try to calm yourself down. At least, that’s the way the study was discussed in the press – as a […]